Rocky Mount staff previews redesigned city website; rollout expected within two weeks

City information-technology staff showed Rocky Mount city council members a redesigned municipal website during the committee-of-the-whole meeting, saying the update is intended to fix repeated outages, simplify navigation and improve mobile and accessibility features.

The website project lead, Greg Robertson, told the council the current vendor had ‘‘shortcomings when it comes to performance,’’ citing intermittent shutdowns that prompted the city to seek alternatives. Robertson said the new design offers hover menus showing department snapshots, quick “services” links for common tasks and an interactive garbage-and-recycling calendar color-coded for Rocky Mount routing.

The presentation emphasized faster page speed and simplified pathways for users: Robertson described built-in “breadcrumbs” so visitors can return to higher-level pages without restarting navigation. He also demonstrated three separate calendars for events, meetings and sanitation routing and said the site will preserve news archives rather than removing older items.

In response to a council question about remembering addresses for sanitation lookups, Robertson said the city can “follow-up” on whether cookies can be implemented to avoid repeated address entry but cautioned privacy concerns on public devices. He also said the site prioritizes ADA accessibility and that the city is “ahead of the curve” on several accessibility features.

Robertson said the site will include links to council agendas and minutes and a channel to the city’s YouTube page for archived meeting video. He told the council that some staff and departmental users will have direct editing access and that most updates will still flow through the web team. "We plan to roll this out over the next week, through February. So we should be live in the next 2 weeks," Robertson said.

Councilors asked about chat and texting features; Robertson said users must opt in to text messages and that a chat function has been answering many questions for Tar River Transit. The presentation closed after a demonstration of searchable content such as museum hours and utility payment options.

Staff said they will follow up with answers about cookies and specific departmental editing permissions and will provide council with access to test pages before full public launch.